It hasn’t been a good month to be in school in America. Chris Garcia reports that there have been six school shootings in the last 30 days. There may have been more. But one in particular stands out. Last week in a town near Los Angeles a 15-year old boy was shot dead. His killer was a 14-year-old boy who attended the same school. News reports suggest that Brandon McInerney killed Lawrence King because King was openly gay and/or transgendered.

So here we have two young lives destroyed. One boy is dead, the other is facing more than 50 years in prison. There is, as you might expect, plenty of ranting going on. But thankfully many of the posts I am now seeing are pointing out that there are two tragedies here. Yes, Lawrence King is dead. And yes, Brandon McInerney is a murderer. But 14-year-old boys generally don’t go around executing their fellow pupils on a whim. People have to put ideas into their heads first. Lorri L Jean of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center puts it better than I could:

No one is born hating gay and transgender people or believing that we should be denied equal rights. Such hatred and bigotry must be learned. It is learned in families that don’t accept their own children if they’re different than the norm. It is learned in right wing churches where ministers preach abomination or in schools where teachers and administrators don’t protect LGBT kids from bullying and harassment. It is learned from political leaders who support blatant discrimination again us or whose leadership fails them when it’s time to speak out and take action on behalf of our equality and our humanity.

All of these behaviors suggest that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are fair game for bigotry and hatred. They encourage impressionable young people to fear and hate not only themselves, but others. And too often this hatred takes the form of violence and innocent young people end up dead. Nothing is “pro-family” about that.

(For the full text see here.)

When these things happen, it is always some impressionable young person who pays the price. The extremist preachers who rail against gays, or who encourage people to blow themselves up to strike a blow against Western Imperialism, always get away with it. There will, of course, be more calls for anti-hate-crime laws. In response, the extremists will hide behind their First Amendment rights. It is apparently a human right to be allowed to encourage other people to kill gays and trangenders; it is only a crime if you actually do the deed.

And to a certain extent they are right. Because once you go down the path of forbidding speech, you soon get into the idiotic realms of laws against “glorifying terrorism” where it can be a crime just to possess the wrong books. You also get the ridiculous situation where people who oppose homophobia are accused of committing hate crimes against the religious.

There is, however, one area where freedom of speech can be used against the hate-mongers. Scarcely a week goes by without some report of someone trying to ban books for children that contain mention of LGBT people. In Tennessee there is a move afoot to ban schools from making any mention of homosexuality. If it succeeds, schools will legally prevented from teaching children like Brandon that children like Lawrence are ordinary human beings who deserve to be respected, not abominations who deserve to be killed.

People who make this sort of complain generally say that they are trying to prevent their children from being “turned gay”. But, much as banning sex education in schools only adds to the number of teenage pregnancies, banning discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity just makes more kids like Brandon McInerney: deluded foot-soldiers who will throw their lives away acting out the hate-filled fantasies of their elders.

Only by talking can people learn to live together in peace.